A packed audience at Magg Bros in Soho came to hear William Feaver in conversation with Michael Prodger about Feaver’s highly acclaimed The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth (Bloomsbury).
Feaver revealed how he had progressed from what had originally been proposed as a slim, World of Art paperback and from his subject’s discouraging early reaction to sample chapters (“drivel”) to a 700-page work that is only the first of two volumes. He had amassed more than 40 cassette tapes of interviews with the artist, but found even more useful the telephone conversations that he and Freud had held almost every weekday for many years. He said that he had never wanted to be painted by Freud, who in any case did not want to paint him – “he said I looked to much like Lytton Strachey”; and he discussed how he had dealt with the unappealing sides of Freud’s character.